Greenwald will set up offices in New York, San Francisco and Washington D.C., but he’ll remain in Brazil, where he lives, and bring some staff there. When Greenwald spoke with The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple yesterday, Greenwald declined to say where the new venture’s headquarters would be.

The new venture will be “a general media outlet and news site — it’s going to have sports and entertainment and features,” Greenwald told Smith. “I’m working on the whole thing but the political journalism unit is my focus.”

Greenwald certainly won’t be the first journalist to make the leap from reporting on things to running things. Yesterday, Politico co-founder Jim VandeHei talked with Brent Lang about his big promotion Monday to CEO of both Politico and Capital New York.

“I’ve been here from the beginning,” VandeHei told The Wrap. “I co-founded Politico seven years ago, so it’s not like I’m going from being a beat reporter at the Wall Street Journal to being the CEO of the company.”

On Twitter, The Wall Street Journal’s Farhad Manjoo noted a particular irony about the way news of Greenwald’s new venture broke: